[continued from previous message]

senior vice president and head scientist for the Alexa team, detailed a
feature that allows the voice assistant to replicate a specific human voice.

In a demonstration video, a child said, `` Alexa, can Grandma finish reading
me the Wizard of Oz?''

Alexa confirmed the request with the default, robotic voice, then
immediately switched to a softer, more humanlike tone, seemingly mimicking
the child's family member.

The Alexa team developed a model that allows its voice assistant to produce
a high-quality voice with ``less than a minute of recorded audio,''
Prasad said. [...]

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/22/amazon-demonstrates-alexa-mimicking-the-voice-of-a-deceased-relative.html

------------------------------

Date: Tue, 28 Jun 2022 19:12:38 -0600
From: Matthew Kruk <mkrukg@gmail.com>
Subject: South Carolina mom says baby monitor was hacked; Experts say many
devices are vulnerable (NPR)

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/06/05/617196788/s-c-mom-says-baby-monitor-was-hacked-experts-say-many-devices-are-vulnerable

[Security on the Internet of Things? Ya gotta be kiddin'.]

------------------------------

Date: Wed, 29 Jun 2022 06:50:48 -0600
From: Matthew Kruk <mkrukg@gmail.com>
Subject: St. John's woman loses home after Phoenix pay fiasco (CBC)

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/phoenix-pay-joanne-osmond-1.6500083

------------------------------

Date: Sun, 26 Jun 2022 11:30:39 -0700
From: Lauren Weinstein <lauren@vortex.com>
Subject: "These Period Tracker Apps Say They Put Privacy First. Here's What
We Found. (Consumer Reports)

https://www.consumerreports.org/health-privacy/period-tracker-apps-privacy-a2278134145/

------------------------------

Date: Wed, 29 Jun 2022 11:39:44 -0600
From: Matthew Kruk <mkrukg@gmail.com>
Subject: FCC asks Google, Apple to remove TikTok due to data privacy
concerns at Chinese-owned company TikTok (CBC) https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/tiktok-fcc-1.6505269

------------------------------

Date: Wed, 29 Jun 2022 07:35:58 -0400
From: Jan Wolitzky <jan.wolitzky@gmail.com>
Subject: Lost and Found: USB Sticks With Data on 460,000 People (NYTimes)

The plight of a technician tasked with transferring a city's worth of
personal data is a lesson in the risks of combining small, important objects with a night out drinking.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/28/world/asia/usb-japan-flash-drive-amagasai.html

------------------------------

Date: Tue, 28 Jun 2022 19:17:46 -0700
From: geoff goodfellow <geoff@iconia.com>
Subject: Some Crypto Exchanges Already Secretly Insolvent (Forbes)

*After throwing lifelines to troubled digital currency platforms BlockFi and Voyager Digital, Sam Bankman-Fried, the 30-year-old billionaire founder of
FTX, warns that some crypto exchanges will soon fail.*

The question on everybodY's mind in the crypto world is whether we've
reached the market bottom. Nearly $2 trillion in crypto market value has evaporated since November. Two bellwether digital assets Luna, a $40 billion crypto asset associated with TerraUSD, a $16 billion stablecoin designed to maintain parity with the U.S. dollar, have collapsed. Earlier this month bitcoin traded for below $20,000, its lowest level since December 2020.

But the fallout is far from complete. Earlier this month, Singapore-based
Three Arrows Capital (3AC), a highly levered crypto trading firm with $200 million of exposure to Luna revealed that it was nearly insolvent. Three
Arrows had borrowed large sums from numerous crypto firms including New Jersey's Voyager Digital and New York-based BlockFi. In order to survive
Three Arrows' default, the two digital asset exchanges turned to billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of FTX and the richest person in crypto, worth
some $20.5 billion. Between FTX and his quantitative trading firm Alameda,
he provided the companies with $750 million in credit lines. There is no guarantee that Bankman-Fried will recoup his investment. ``You know, we're willing to do a somewhat bad deal here, if that's what it takes to sort of stabilize things and protect customers,'' he says. [...]

https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenehrlich/2022/06/28/bankman-fried-some-crypto-exchanges-already-secretly-insolvent/

------------------------------

Date: Tue, 21 Jun 2022 07:55:56 -0700
From: Lauren Weinstein <lauren@vortex.com>
Subject: Unintended Centralities in Distributed [Blockchain] Ledgers

https://assets-global.website-files.com/5fd11235b3950c2c1a3b6df4/62af6c641a672b3329b9a480_Unintended_Centralities_in_Distributed_Ledgers.pdf

------------------------------

Date: Thu, 30 Jun 2022 12:46:58 -0400
From: Gabe Goldberg <gabe@gabegold.com>
Subject: Crypto Crash Widens Divide Between Rich and Amateur Traders
(NYTimes)

No cryptocurrency investor has been spared the pain of plunging prices. But the fallout from more than $700 billion in losses is far from even.

Photo: Tyler Winklevoss, left, and Cameron Winklevoss, center, performing
with Mars Junction in Englewood, Colo. The billionaires recently laid off 10 percent of the staff at Gemini, their crypto firm.

ENGLEWOOD, Colo. -- The cryptocurrency market was in ruins. But Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss were jamming.

Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, whose wealth stood at $4 billion apiece before the crash, were each worth $3.3 billion this week, according to Forbes. They declined to comment.

For retail investors like Ben Thompson, 33, the reality is different.
Mr. Thompson, who lives in Sydney, Australia, lost about $45,000 — half his savings — in the crash. He had dabbled in crypto since 2018 and planned to use the money to open a brewery.

"A lot of people who seemed quite reputable had a lot of confidence,"
Mr. Thompson said. "The smaller people get taken advantage of."

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/29/technology/crypto-crash-divide.html

------------------------------

Date: Thu, 30 Jun 2022 12:24:15 -0700
From: Lauren Weinstein <lauren@vortex.com>
Subject: Cryptocurrency Titan Coinbase providing "Geo Tracking Data" to ICE
(The Intercept)

https://theintercept.com/2022/06/29/crypto-coinbase-tracer-ice/

------------------------------

Date: Fri, 1 Jul 2022 08:43:02 -0700
From: Lauren Weinstein <lauren@vortex.com>
Subject: Crypto traceability and market rules agreed by EU lawmakers
(TechCrunch)

https://techcrunch.com/2022/07/01/crypto-regulation-eu/

------------------------------

Date: Tue, 21 Jun 2022 00:22:51 -0400
From: Monty Solomon <monty@roscom.com>
Subject: Crypto investors' hot streak ends as harsh 'winter' descends
(The Boston Globe)

"There was this irrational exuberance." https://www.boston.com/news/business/2022/06/20/crypto-winter/

------------------------------

Date: Thu, 30 Jun 2022 14:07:01 -0400
From: Gabe Goldberg <gabe@gabegold.com>
Subject: Alex Mashinky's Celsius crypto bank draws probe by five states
(WashPost)

In 2018, Alex Mashinsky held a dinner at an upscale restaurant in New
York. The entrepreneur's goal was to attract "whales"— crypto-speak for large-scale currency holders who can move markets — to invest in a nascent entity he'd created called Celsius Network.

The Ukraine-born, Israel-raised businessman spoke charmingly and
passionately, according to a person who was at the dinner and described it
on the condition of anonymity because it was a private event. He laid out
his mission of "unbanking,"in which investors can deposit cryptocurrency outside the traditional financial system. Central to the pitch were
unusually high yields for depositors in his Celsius Network — as much as 30 percent — made possible, the New York-based Mashinsky explained, because their money would be lent out at high rates to those needing it for
short-term crypto investments.

"It was incredible to watch -- everyone in the room was enthralled,"said the guest. "The whales were excited and ready to write checks. Even people who might have been skeptical were on board." [...]

He made the case to Wall Street that he could offer much higher yields
without the bureaucratic costs and profit-taking of traditional banks, and
he also marketed those yields — which could reach between 20 and 30 percent -- to depositors. [...]

Still, business was slow. The company's own CEL token, launched in the fall
of 2018 to help facilitate transactions, ended 2019 at just 14 cents -- only the slightest improvement from the 10 cents it was worth the previous
spring. [...]

The company has fallen in the eyes of a number of the faithful. After
Mashinsky tweeted a stay-strong message last week (``@CelsiusNetwork team is working non-stop. To see you come together is a clear sign our community is
the strongest in the world''), one user replied angrily. "Please allow us
to withdraw OUR funds,"wrote @TzannakosPat. "People have their life savings
on Celsius. The community is strong and together we should demand and [sic] formal investigation. You can't just take peoples money and coins."

That frustration was felt by Alex, a Celsius customer in Maryland who asked
not to be fully identified to protect himself online. He has about $20,000
in his account now, he said, money he was counting on to help support his
son. "I'm feeling pretty bad to be honest,"he said.

Bitboy Crypto, the pseudonym of a prominent crypto influencer named Ben Armstrong, who has nearly 900,000 followers on Twitter, had long advocated Celsius to his followers. But after the freeze, he changed his tune.

"We were lied to about the safety of our funds by Alex @Mashinsky,"he
tweeted Saturday as he offered suggestions for legal action — in turn prompting some to blame him for cheerleading for Celsius for so long.

Yet many of Mashinsky's adherents have refused to give up. They see the
freeze not as a sign of malfeasance but as one more piece of evidence that traditional finance wants to destroy crypto and will stop at nothing to
realize its aim.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/06/21/celsius-withdrawal-freeze-explained/

SLIGHT improvement -- 10 cents to 14 is 40% in maybe 15 months. I'll take
it.

------------------------------

Date: Wed, 29 Jun 2022 09:11:27 -0700
From: Lauren Weinstein <lauren@vortex.com>
Subject: LOL Headline of the Day

"Crypto[currency] crash threatens North Korea's stolen funds."

------------------------------

Date: Tue, 21 Jun 2022 09:21:22 -0400
From: Monty Solomon <monty@roscom.com>
Subject: When customers say their money was stolen on Zelle, banks often
refuse to pay (NYTimes)

Federal law requires banks to reimburse customers for unauthorized
electronic transfers, but they often refuse, stranding victims.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/20/business/zelle-money-stolen-banks.html

[Your money is carefully wrapped in Zellephane. PGN]

------------------------------

Date: Wed, 29 Jun 2022 17:25:57 -0400
From: Gabe Goldberg <gabe@gabegold.com>
Subject: Planned Parenthood Privacy (WashPost)

The organization left marketing trackers running on its scheduling pages.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/06/29/planned-parenthood-privacy

------------------------------

Date: 25 Jun 2022 20:34:27 -0400
From: "John Levine" <johnl@iecc.com>
Subject: Re: Micropatching on the fly (Tom Van Vleck)

There is a DARPA/I2O program that is awarding ways to patch IoT
appliances and heavy truck engines:
https://www.darpa.mil/program/assured-micropatching

What could possibly go wrong? THVV

Plenty, but this is an engineering question. We expect some amount of
damage from unpatched cruddy old equipment. We have some level of risk from this hack patch approach. Which is likely to cause more trouble overall?

I have no idea but since there is no question that we're seeing a lot
of damage from unpatched IoT (for example, the Mirai botnet) I wouldn't
dismiss it out of hand.

------------------------------

Date: Mon, 20 Jun 2022 22:55:00 -0400
From: "Steven J. Greenwald" <greenwald.steve@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: A Periodic Issue

I thought I restrained myself with the puns on that one. I still remember getting yelled at by a strident feminist circa 1990 when I used a COBOL programming term, which we really truly used -- a lot --.when the compiler aborted on a COBOL sentence that didn't get terminated properly. We called those "pregnant" because they were missing their periods.

Re: my late darkness, well, three major neurosurgeries surgeries in 5 months will do that to you (for my spine; long boring medical story omitted). I'm
much much better now though (and 40% titanium, I think, with really cool
scars that look like I got attacked by either an alligator or an eagle, depending on where you come from). : )

------------------------------

Date: Tue, 21 Jun 2022 09:03:55 +0100
From: Martin Ward <martin@gkc.org.uk>
Subject: Re: Long-term planning and Optimization (RISKS-33.28)

Oxfam's report, published in January 2022, states that:

"The world's ten richest men more than doubled their fortunes from $700
billion to $1.5 trillion -- at a rate of $15,000 per second or $1.3
billion a day -- during the first two years of a pandemic that has seen
the incomes of 99 percent of humanity fall and over 160 million more
people forced into poverty.

"Inequality goes to the heart of the climate crisis, as the richest 1
percent emit more than twice as much CO2 as the bottom 50 percent of the
world, driving climate change throughout 2020 and 2021"

"The carbon footprints of the richest 1 percent of people on Earth is set
to be 30 times greater than the level compatible with the 1.5°C goal of
the Paris Agreement in 2030. The poorest half of the global population
will still emit far below the 1.5°C-aligned level in 2030."

The problem is not "too many people" but "too many rich people"! There is plenty of money and resources in the world to feed everyone and tackle
climate change, the problem is inequitable distribution of resources and lobbying against the needed changes by powerful vested interests and corrupt governments.

https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/ten-richest-men-double-their-fortunes-pandemic-while-incomes-99-percent-humanity

------------------------------

Date: Tue, 21 Jun 2022 10:01:30 +0100
From: Martin Ward <martin@gkc.org.uk>
Subject: Re: Long-term planning and Optimization (Mills. RISKS-33.28)

China's draconian "One Child Policy", implemented between 1980 and 2015, is claimed to have prevented over 400 million births. Yet China's CO2
emissions increased by around five times in the same period.

------------------------------

Date: Mon, 20 Jun 2022 18:03:05 -0700
From: geoff goodfellow <geoff@iconia.com>
Subject: Re: It is 2022. My coffee mug wants me to log in, wants to know
my location, and if it can send me promotional emails... (RISKS-33.30)

looks like the URL in RISKS got mangled, here's a working one:
https://twitter.com/Marc_IRL/status/1537187487675711488
(The final '8' was summarily dropped)

------------------------------

Date: Fri, 1 Jul 2022 2:31:20 PDT
From: Peter Neumann <neumann@csl.sri.com>
Subject: AT&T Fiber Optic outage update

[From a PGN neighbor, Re: RISKS-33.13-15,20]

We've had a lot of interactions with AT&T people on this issue. including
with someone who was honest and knew something. My general question was:
companies have been stringing cables for decades, if not centuries.
Presumably the squirrel problem has been resolved???

His answer was clear: all other cables were metallic, either the conductor
or the shield. The fiber cables are not. Squirrels and rats have trouble
with metal, although they do succeed sometimes. When ATT chose the fiber
to install, in the interest of weight and cost, they decided against a
metallic shield. Apparently this works in most places, but a few
locations have high squirrel activity, and they have to replace short
sections with squirrel-protected cable after the problem....not
proactively.

That is to say....the problems will continue, although slowly
diminishing, as more cable gets squirrel shielding.

Kudos to AT&T for stepping up to deliver the long-hoped-for "fiber to the
home". This is a huge deal, and a massive step to the future. Too bad
they didn't invest more in better cables. -Jeff

------------------------------

Date: Mon, 1 Aug 2020 11:11:11 -0800
From: RISKS-request@csl.sri.com
Subject: Abridged info on RISKS (comp.risks)

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------------------------------

End of RISKS-FORUM Digest 33.31
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